Frederick W. Beinecke (1887-1971)

Frederick W. Beinecke nurtured, along with his two brothers and lifelong business partners Edwin and Walter, The Sperry & Hutchinson Company (S&H) of New York City, the leading trading stamp company in the United States.

Frederick W. Beinecke (born April 12, 1887 in New York City, NY; died July 30, 1971 in Great Barrington, MA) [1]
(known as “Fritz” to family and friends) nurtured, along with his two brothers
and lifelong business partners Edwin and Walter, The Sperry & Hutchinson
Company (S&H) of New York City. The United States’ leading trading stamp
company, S&H and their “Green Stamps” redemption coupons became one of the most
successful and recognizable symbols of post-Second World War American consumer
culture. Their father, German-born hotelier Bernhard, instilled a strong sense
of careful investment, corporate responsibility, and civic duty in his sons.
Edwin, Fritz, and Walter were passionate rare book collectors who donated much
of their personal wealth, collections, spare time and energy to furthering Yale
University’s academic goals. Today, the architecturally stunning Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library stands as one of the world’s greatest repositories
of early and historic documents, images, and artifacts.

Frederick W. Beinecke was born on April
12, 1887 to Johann Bernhard Georg Beinecke (April 22, 1846–December 20, 1932)
and Johanna Elisabeth Beinecke (née
Weigle) (1858–March 21, 1938) in New York City. The Beineckes managed a large
household, eventually comprising Frederick (known as “Fritz” to family and
friends) and five siblings: Bernhard (June 15, 1876–July 9, 1936), Alice
(December 23, 1881–January 12, 1954), Theodora (August 9, 1883–April 12, 1940),
Edwin (January 6, 1886–January 21, 1970), and Walter (May 4, 1888–September 3,
1958). A sixth sibling, Johanna, was born on November 2, 1882, but died two
months short of her fourth birthday.

Bernhard Beinecke grew up in Elberfeld,
near Wuppertal, Germany, before immigrating through Castle Garden to New York
City in 1865.[2] Only
nineteen on arrival, he soon demonstrated his natural business prowess. Bernhard
signed on as a wagon driver for a meat concern; within a few short years he
bought the company and appropriately renamed it Beinecke & Company.[3]
The company’s growth, in turn, introduced Bernhard to New York society. On
April 12, 1875, he married Johanna Elisabeth Weigle at the German Evangelical
Presbyterian Church in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He spent the next fifteen
years gradually expanding and cementing his company’s position in the city’s
vital meat packing industry. These efforts culminated with the 1890 acquisition
of rival firms Ottman & Company and T. C. Eastman Company, Limited.
Beinecke & Company assumed control of New York City’s largest stockyard,
located along Fifty-Ninth Street and the Hudson River.[4]

The United States witnessed tremendous
mobility at the turn of the twentieth century, a period of globalization known
as the “Belle Époque” (“Beautiful Age”). The upper and middle classes traveled
more than ever before, and major cities were redeveloped in gentrification
movements under such visionaries as Frederick Law Olmsted. Delivering meats to
New York City’s major hotels, Bernhard quickly appreciated the opportunities
awaiting him in this burgeoning market.[5]
In 1890, he purchased the (then-unfinished) Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue at the southeast
corner of Central Park. Profits from the Plaza led Beinecke and his board to
construct the Manhattan Hotel in 1896. By 1901, he decided to demolish and
rebuild the still-young Plaza Hotel. With Harry S. Black, president of the
George A. Fuller Construction Company and its parent company, the United States
Realty and Improvement Company, and nationally recognized hotelier Fred Sterry
(who became The Plaza’s first director), Beinecke tore down the fifteen-year-old
building in 1905 and replaced it with a magnificent complex later described as
“the most elegant hotel in America.”[6]
Designed by the nation’s leading hotel architect, Henry J. Hardenbergh, creator
of the Manhattan and Waldorf-Astoria hotels in New York City and the Willard
Hotel in Washington, D.C., no expense was spared in building and furnishing The
Plaza.[7]
Handmade Irish linen, French Baccarat-produced glassware, and carefully
selected English oak panels were imported to recreate the “effect of a French
chateau.”[8]
The board of the United States Realty Trust Company, the Plaza Operating
Company’s parent entity, included such leading financiers as James Stillman
(National City Bank of New York, now Citibank), John W. Gates (affiliated with
the Texas Company, now Texaco), Charles M. Schwab, and William F. Havemeyer.[9]
On its opening day, Alfred Vanderbilt signed the register book first; Bernhard
and his family were the third. Within the first months, many of America’s elite
family dynasties, from the Vanderbilts and George Gould to Benjamin Duke and
Oliver Harriman, had taken up semi-permanent rooms in The Plaza.[10]
In only twenty-five years, Bernhard had transformed himself from a youthful
immigrant into one of New York City’s most influential entrepreneurs. Over the
next decade, he expanded his hotel empire, including the crosstown Savoy Plaza
and Boston’s famed Copley Plaza.[11]
Under Bernhard’s direction, the Plazas became the first high-end hotel chain in
the United States. The hotel chain’s success also deepened the Beineckes’
relationship with the Fuller Company. The Fuller Construction Company, founded in
1882, had established itself as the United States’ foremost builder of
skyscrapers. Before constructing The Plaza, Fuller had already completed the
New York Times building and the famous Flatiron skyscraper at 175 Fifth Avenue,
Manhattan.[12] IIn 1966, the Beineckes still held the
largest share block in the construction firm that in New York City alone had
gone on to build both Pennsylvania Station and the United Nations headquarters.[13]

Fritz and his siblings came of age in
this exciting environment. Fritz’s son, William S. Beinecke, later described
his grandfather as “a man of astounding energy, ability, acumen, and audacity,”
traits he inculcated in his children from an early age. Edwin, Fritz, and
Walter, in particular, took this to heart, remaining both intimate friends and
business colleagues for their entire lives.[14]
In New York City, the brothers lived in a well-appointed townhouse on 47 East
78th Street (and later West 76th Street). But their favorite place was
Oscawanna, the Beineckes’ country residence, situated near Peekskill on the
Hudson River.[15] Summers
were spent with tutors and friends at Oscawanna, or on trips to Western Europe.[16]
A 1902 trip, for instance, included Belgian windmills, Pompeii, the Rhine River
Valley, Pisa, Berlin, and the Doge’s Palace in Venice.[17]
The brothers, who learned to speak fluent German from their parents at an early
age, first attended Columbia Grammar School, a private primary school
originally established by Columbia University. There, they proved to be strong
students; Fritz joined the chess club and was elected president of the school’s
Hawthorne Literary and Debating Society. He continued on to Phillips Academy at
Andover, Massachusetts, a preparatory school long favored with the New England
elite. Wryly known as the “good-natured Dutchman” for his Saxon stature by
fellow students, he perfected his sports abilities, musical talents, and
expertise in German and Latin.[18]

Fritz entered Yale in the fall of 1905.
By the end of the nineteenth century Yale, along with Harvard and Princeton,
had become a bastion of wealthy American families. At the turn of the twentieth
century, sixty-five percent of New York City’s elite sent their sons to the
“Big Three.”[19] American
higher education was only just beginning to undergo the momentous process that
would eventually transform universities into centers of academic rigor, rather
than sites of social training. Young men of the right backgrounds were expected
to hold “elevated tastes in art and literature as well as manifestly amateur
skills in athletics.”[20]
Demonstrated academic abilities fell somewhat further down the priority list.[21]
The Beinecke brothers however bucked this stereotype. Fritz had always been an
outstanding student, and initially hoped to pursue classics at Yale. But his
mind was soon drawn to engineering problems, and he formally switched into
Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School (now merged into Yale College of Arts and
Sciences and Yale School of Engineering).[22]
He received general department honors, graduated summa cum laude, and was
inducted into Sigma Xi, the national engineering honor society.[23]
Friends knew him as a natural tinkerer, and he was also a member of the
football team that led Yale to victory over Princeton in the November 15, 1908
final.[24]
Cecil Rhodes, who on his deathbed in 1902 had established the famed scholarship
for scholar-athletes that would bear his name, might have been delighted if Fritz had applied to Oxford.

Fritz wanted to prove himself before
entering his family’s businesses. After graduating, he joined the Bethlehem
Steel Corporation as an inspector.[25]
But the job’s dullness soon motivated him to renew his search for work, and in
early 1910 he became a rodman for the New York Central Railroad (NYCR). For $40
a week (or $947 in 2010 dollars), he operated technical equipment for a survey
party.[26]
Like his father, management soon noticed his skillful leadership; within months
Fritz was appointed an assistant supervisor for the NYCR.[27]
He designed signs warning passers-by of the newly electrified railroad tracks.
This, evidently, was a boring task for the energetic young engineer, for he mischievously
fashioned the sign with a small Latin phrase at the bottom. No one thought the
addition of the “Cave Canem” was out of place until the NYCR’s general counsel
realized sometime later that it meant “Beware of the Dog.”[28]His
brief foray with Bethlehem Steel had not proven fruitless, however. On weekends
off he took the morning Lehigh Valley railroad to Cranford, New Jersey. There,
he courted twenty-year-old Caroline Regina Sperry, a daughter of William and
Caroline Sperry. An intelligent, lively young woman, Caroline (known as
“Carrie” to family and friends) had spent her formative years at The Ogontz
School for Young Ladies, a prestigious finishing academy that later educated
Amelia Earhart. They married in Cranford on November 14, 1912 and took up residence
at 817 West End Avenue in New York City, where their son William was born on
May 22,.[29]
Their marriage would last nearly sixty years and forge one of America’s largest
companies.

The next three years finally provided Fritz with
opportunities to put his ample energy and intelligence to work. In 1911, he was
appointed chief engineer for the Red Hook Light and Power Company, based near
Poughkeepsie, New York and responsible for electric power throughout the Hudson
River Valley.[30] This
time, he was tasked with an engineering problem more suited to his strong
talent. Red Hook hoped to construct an important hydroelectric power facility
at Roeliff Jansen Kill, a Hudson tributary northeast of Poughkeepsie and
Kingston. For months, he rode up to Roeliff Jansen Kill on his motorcycle,
itself a toy he loved tinkering with, to direct the reshaping of the local
streams, and dam and powerhouse construction.[31]

His success with Red Hook earned him a
partnership offer in early 1914 from the Washington Power Works in New York
City. At the time, Washington Power was seeking new, more efficient methods of
oil burning for ocean-going vessels. In so doing, they hoped to expand into a
lucrative market. The fastest transatlantic liners, including RMS Olympic, RMS Aquitania, RMS Mauretania,
and the German SS Imperator, all
burnt vast quantities of coal. Coal-fired ships required frequent refueling,
forcing ships into the nearest port and restricting transoceanic operations. An
oil-based system was far more efficient, but required pressurized air to be
forced through a burner in order to increase the fire’s heat and hence the
amount of steam released for propulsion. The system’s efficiency, however,
required the disintegration of the oil into droplets, a mechanism that had yet to
be effectively designed. Fritz helped engineer a solution: a “power atomizer”
fuel injector, separating the oil into a mist continuously sprayed into the
burner.[32]
Both his work and that of others played a role in the First World War: in the
Dreadnought-building competition before 1914, American and European navies
clamored to convert their fleets to oil.[33]
His work on the power atomizer piqued the interest of the Texas Company, which
was eager to take advantage of developments in energy and petroleum
engineering.[34] The
Texas Company soon hired Fritz as director of its New York City vehicle
division, gaining both his energy knowledge and management experience.

The coming of war did not at first
threaten Fritz’s young family. General prosperity continued to flourish,
particularly in the burgeoning cities.[35]
He spent weekends with family, or fixing his car, or fishing, hunting, and
boating with Edwin and Walter.[36]
In 1915 the family moved to a suburban house in Cranford, New Jersey, away from
Manhattan’s chaotic atmosphere.[37]William’s brother Richard was born there in 1917.[38]
After the American entrance into the war, Fritz registered with the Draft
Office on June 5, 1917.[39]
He was not called up until a week before the Armistice; on November 2, 1918 the
War Department commissioned him as a captain in the Quartermaster Corps, with
responsibilities over construction projects and logistics.[40]
Some months later, the family watched from the windows of The Plaza Hotel as
returning American servicemen paraded up Fifth Avenue.[41]
Fritz remained on the reserve list until 1929.[42]

Drawing on his German industrial roots,
Bernhard trained his sons to be astute businessmen. Fritz carefully and
constantly monitored the market for the next big opportunity. By the end of the
First World War, much of the Texas Company’s profits increasingly derived from
automobile gasoline, rather than such traditional mainstays as railroads and
ships. From his position in charge of The Texas Company’s New York City vehicle
and horse-drawn carriage division, Fritz had become very familiar with the
fledgling automobile industry. After a brief stint working for Studebaker
Corporation, in 1919 he and two associates, Ira Jones and Frank Sholes, struck
out on their own, establishing the Studebaker Sales Company of Newark, New
Jersey.[43]

The Studebaker Sales Company of Newark
was not a directly owned Studebaker subsidiary: the Company sold both directly
to consumers and acted as a middleman distributor to smaller dealerships.[44]
In this capacity, Fritz and his partners developed their enterprise into one of
the largest Studebaker retailers of its kind outside Los Angeles (which had
secured an early lead in general automobile demand). His company performed
remarkably well, riding the postwar economic boom.

When Fritz invested in Studebaker, the
Indiana-based motor company was at the height of its success. In 1916, a year
before the United States’ entrance into the First World War, Studebaker’s
profits reached record highs. And only eighteen months after the end of the
war, sales had already recovered to near-1916 levels: 51,474 vehicles for a
pre-expenditure income of $90.7 million (or $985 million in 2010 dollars).[45]
Fritz’s Los Angeles counterpart, Paul G. Hoffman, inculcated the city’s strong
car culture. In response to increasing traffic problems, he was appointed chair
of the County’s road committees, responsible for road design, management, and
planning. Hoffman hired the Olmsted firm to design new road systems, thus
increasing consumer confidence in vehicle safety, and increasing purchases of
new vehicles.[46] By
1920, Studebaker cemented its position in the motor industry with such popular
cars as the attractively designed and priced forty-horsepower Special Six.[47]
Confident of future demand, Fritz stayed in the Studebaker business for nearly
a decade before divesting himself of his interest in the Newark firm in 1928.

Fritz’s father had long practiced a
cautious approach to business, never investing his entire capital in a single
venture. Fritz and his brothers followed this logic, spreading their talent and
investments in several enterprises. All three had begun working in The Plaza
from youth, and retained ownership stakes.[48]
But Edwin, Fritz, and Walter were about to embark on an entirely new venture, a
corporation that would eventually be listed on the Fortune 500 Index and become
synonymous with commercial savings.

When Fritz wed Carrie Sperry in 1912,
he married into a prosperous, self-made business family. Her uncle, Thomas A.
Sperry, shared Bernhard Beinecke’s entrepreneurial talent. At seventeen, he
found a job with a Bridgeport, Connecticut–based silverware firm as a traveling
salesman. “His work carried him over a large part of the United States,” S&H
president George Caldwell recalled in 1921, “and he had a rare opportunity to
study the subject [of maximizing sales] under varying conditions and from all
angles.”[49]
The coupons concept, then quite new in business, deeply interested Sperry. He
spent much of his free time between 1891 and 1896 learning about a newly
created type of coupon known as the trading stamp.

In early 1896, Sperry partnered with
Shelley Hutchinson, a Baltimore businessman, to form the Sperry and Hutchinson
Company (S&H) in Jackson, Michigan.[50]
Caldwell waxed lyrical about the company’s rapid success: “It is sufficient to
say that the plan swept like prairie fire, ran up the Hudson River to Albany,
over the trail of the Indian through the Mohawk Valley to Buffalo, and then
across our vast deserts and over and through the mountains until we reached the
great Pacific.”[51]
Dramatic prose aside, Sperry and Hutchinson’s experiment paid rapid dividends. The
trading stamp idea was remarkably simple yet elegant. A customer received a
number of postage-sized stamps for every purchase he or she made with a
participating vendor. After customers had collected a sufficient number of
stamps (normally quantified in terms of x
stamp books filled), they could redeem them with the stamp company for
products. The system was designed to be mutually beneficial: merchants paid the
stamp company to participate (usually a small percentage of their earnings). In
exchange, the stamp company provided stamps to be given with customers’
purchases; the incentive to collect stamps (and receive gifts) would drive up
consumer demand for merchants, who could reap higher profits.[52]
Each stamp corresponded to a ten-cent purchase; a book held twelve hundred
stamps, or the equivalent of one hundred and twenty dollars in purchases
necessary for stamp collection.[53]
The refinement, William Beinecke recalled, “was to have a company make the
stamps available to a variety of merchants and then redeem them at the
company.”[54]

On February 1, 1897, the first Green
Stamp redemption center opened at 42 Cannon Street, Bridgeport under the
short-lived name of Merchants’ Supply Company.[55]
An 1897 S&H financial statement submitted to the Bradstreet Company
suggested the cautious but optimistic path the company hoped to pursue. Instead
of taking out loans, Sperry and Hutchinson each contributed $7,500 ($203,000 in
2010 dollars) from savings in startup costs, and paid for nearly everything in
cash, not credit.[56] By
1902, S&H had opened a number of redemption centers and offices across the
United States in response to popular demand, often under local names. Their
model was prudent yet effective. Only a few employees were required to manage
any single office or redemption center; funds could instead be invested into Green Stamp books and an ever-enlarging selection of products.[57]
S&H prudently selected where to advertise. From at least 1904, the company
published large advertisements in key markets: middle class women (The Ladies’ Home Journal), businessmen
and professionals (The Saturday Evening
Post) and the early “mass-market” monthly Munsey’s Magazine.[58]

The burgeoning
trading stamp industry, led by S&H, bothered some merchants and state
governments. Puck criticized trading
stamps in a 1905 cartoon: a hungry fox attempted to coerce naïve, trading
stamp-carrying pigs into his dark cave.[59] Companies argued
that: (1) trading stamps would provide an inordinate advantage to participating
vendors, breaching the limits of ‘healthy competition,’ ultimately at the
consumer’s expense; and (2) consumers would unknowingly be entering a contract. But in a
series of court cases in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Louisiana, and New
Jersey, state courts agreed that laws barring the distribution or redemption of
trading stamps were unconstitutional as they violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s
guarantee to protect Americans’ right to fairness, choice, equal opportunity,
and right of due process. By enacting anti-trading stamps legislation, courts
ruled, the state had exceeded its “police power” authority.[60]
New Jersey’s
legislature subsequently passed a bill protecting consumers’ right to use
trading stamps.[61] These
legal obstacles did little to stem public interest in trading stamps. A letter
from the Tokyo Fish Market in Los Angeles to another, unnamed company (and
copied to S&H), sent around 1907, typified merchants’ response:

I understand that you wish to use Green
Stamps at your store and I think it is a very desirable option to have the
stamps for the promotion of sales. We had been using the stamps ever since we
opened the store continuously [sic]as a service to our customers. The
stamps have been extremely well received by them. As you well know, this is a
stamp that is being given away by many retailers. Therefore it can be saved
quickly as far as the customers are concerned, so they are very enthusiastic
about saving them.[62]

S&H’s in-house magazine, S&H Topics [later The
Sperry Magazine (1915–1916), The
Sperry System (1916–1919), and The
Sperry Service (1919 onward)], reprinted such correspondence to boost
employee morale and its own populist image.[63]

The company strove to establish itself
as a purveyor of quality goods. Michel A. Levy, an upmarket shoe retailer in
Santa Barbara, California, accepted S&H Green Stamps for discounts off
Laird Schober shoes for women, Johnson & Murphy shoes for men, and J.
Edwards shoes for children.[64]
In department stores, which had begun to change how Americans shopped for and
bought merchandise, S&H erected elaborate “push-button catalogs.” In a
concept reconstituted by department stores a century later with touchscreen
computer terminals, customers could press a button on the face of a wooden box
to view images of selected, “premium” S&H items. The company also installed
these devices in their own redemption centers.[65]
By 1914, the trading stamp industry volume had grown to an estimated $25
million per year ($563 million in 2010 dollars). S&H established an early
lead it would never forfeit.

Thomas Sperry died prematurely at age forty-nine,
a victim of accidental ptomaine poisoning from a European trip.[66]
His brother, Carrie’s father William, immediately assumed the S&H
presidency. After only a year at the helm, he passed S&H’s daily management
on to George Caldwell, but retained a forty-nine percent stock interest and his
boardroom seat.[67] Fritz had not been
the only Beinecke brother to marry a Sperry daughter. On February 17, 1917,
Walter wed Katherine (Katie) Sperry, S&H founder Thomas Sperry’s eldest
child.[68]
When Thomas had died in 1913, Katie was only about twenty years old. According
to William, Thomas in his will stipulated that his four children could not vote
on their inherited S&H shares until they reached the age of thirty. In the
interim, Thomas’s widow Kate, who remarried a Mr. Goodrich, controlled the
other fifty-one percent of S&H’s shares.[69]

Although S&H
enjoyed a swift rise, it remained a relatively small company. Management
shuffles and intermittent legal disputes meant that S&H’s survival was by
no means ensured. Although a first run of half a million copies of their
general magazine quickly sold out when published in October 1915, World War I leveled
off both profit and capital growth.[70]
Nonetheless, in a February 8, 1918 letter to Caldwell, William Sperry expressed
some surprise that S&H had survived as well as it did: “[I]t is gratifying
to learn that we really made a profit in 1917.”[71]
But Sperry was eager to transfer his S&H stake and retire to Florida.
Hoping to place additional investment and long-term stability into the company,
in late 1917 he entered negotiations with his son-in-law Fritz and his brothers
Edwin and Walter to purchase his minority share in the company. Although
S&H endured the war intact and enjoyed similar public interest as in the
prewar years, it remained “[a] very modest enterprise. Its significance paled before
other activities in which the [Beinecke] brothers were engaged.”[72]
Edwin had moved to the top of the larger Fuller Construction Company, and was
destined to eventually take the helm of its parent entity, U.S. Realty
Corporation.[73] Only
later did the Beinecke brothers devote their full attention to S&H and its
potential.

The transaction was
not without mishap. Sperry’s offer to the Beineckes angered S&H president
Caldwell, who felt cheated that none of the shares were first offered to him.
In a February 2 letter, he noted the brothers’ youth and vigor, but questioned
whether they would actually enjoy the stamp business. In response to this
confusion, Fritz wrote to his father-in-law, “In conversation with Edwin, Mr.
Caldwell seemed to feel that you did not offer him the stock in good faith. Of
course, I know that this is only a subterfuge, but in order to clarify this
misunderstanding, I think it advisable to write Mr. Caldwell.”[74]
Tensions among Caldwell, Sperry, and the Beineckes escalated. On February 15
Caldwell complained to Sperry that,

When I wrote to you
I did not know the price you sold it at. Let me congratulate you on selling it
to your son-in-law at so good a price and let me assure you that I would not
buy the stock at half that price. Nor would anyone else, therefore we are
naturally put in a state of suspicion on the deal because I cannot believe that
the Beinecke boys are not good traders and must therefore come to the
conclusion that they bought something that they did not know the value of…let
me assure you that the way this transaction looks from my desk that it is a bit
shady and I say this because I cannot see the motive for it…I cannot believe
that you would attempt to sell Fritz Beinecke your holdings…there is a great
deal of doubt of it [the Green Stamps] being able to get by the various state
legislatures so as to be able to do business.[75]

On the surface, Caldwell’s charge of nepotism
is enticing, but deeper investigation reveals several key problems. First,
Caldwell explicitly did not question the Beinecke brothers’ business acumen,
but rather only the price at which they bought Sperry’s shares. Second, Caldwell’s
obvious lack of confidence in S&H’s future probably enhanced Sperry’s
hesitance to offer him a stake in the company. The Beinecke brothers, on the
other hand, had already proven their commercial expertise in a variety of
industries, were trusted members of Sperry’s extended family, and were backed
by a considerable, stable, and carefully invested fortune. Finally, Caldwell’s
behavior appears to have been orchestrated by Kate Goodrich who maintained her
late husband’s majority interest and, Fritz contended, as early as 1913 had voiced
her concerns that the Beinecke brothers, not her, would eventually be favored
in any corporate shakeup.[76]
Sperry, nonetheless, was delighted with the new arrangement, formalized by the
Babbage & Sanders law firm of New York City in July 1919.[77]
Although the deal transferred an estimated forty-nine percent of S&H shares
to the Beinecke brothers, it was not until summer 1923 that the family would
obtain controlling interest in the company. In June, Katie turned thirty, and
almost immediately exercised her newly empowered right to vote. She voted her
shares alongside her husband Walter, as well as Fritz, and Edwin, thus finally
providing the Beineckes with majority stock ownership.[78]
In anticipation of her inevitable decision, Caldwell had formally retired from
the S&H presidency on January 1, 1923.[79] The three brothers borrowed funds to
purchase the rest of the stock (a loan they quickly repaid with strong S&H
dividends). The Beineckes divided S&H into sixths; each husband and wife
received one-sixth of the company, respectively.[80]

S&H only comprised one of the Beinecke brothers’
holdings.[81] It
remained a stable firm through much of the 1920s, and consumers responded very
positively to the firm’s coupons and product offerings. Consumers purchased and
redeemed an ever-increasing number of Green Stamps. A May 16, 1921 letter from a
Chamber of Commerce in distant Terrell, Texas testified to their growing
popularity:

[H]aving consulted some of our business
men whose firms have done business with your company; and, as a result of this
investigation, said committee has issue to your Mr. E. W. Bowden a certificate
stating that his proposition is legitimate and above board and advising our
business men that, in the opinion of the committee, they will make no mistake
in patronizing him if his proposition [of using Green Stamps] appeals to their
requirements.[82]

On January 1, 1923 Caldwell finally
vacated the S&H presidency to the Beineckes.[83]
Edwin retired from his position as president of Henry Maurer & Son, a large
brick-maker and fireproofing concern, to become S&H president.[84]
Fritz, then fully engaged with Studebaker and his other concerns, did not
become fully involved with S&H until the early 1930s, when his own
financial losses during the Depression galvanized him to enter the
trading-stamp business.[85]
In the interim, Edwin and Vernon C. Brown, who managed daily operations,
continued William Sperry’s cautious growth policies, introducing Green Stamps
into new markets and expanding their merchandise inventory as demand warranted.[86]
For America’s middle and upper classes, the dynamic 1920s proved profitable,
exciting, risky, and entrepreneurial.[87]
Writing in The Sperry Service, Edwin
pressured their employees to invest in Green Stamps, propose creative new uses
for them, and to maintain traditional salesmanship.[88]
In 1925, Fritz and Carrie moved to Madison, New Jersey, where William and
Richard would spend much of the rest of their childhood. Here he maintained his
control of the Studebaker office and travelled to New York City to attend
S&H meetings.[89]

The S&H 1926–1927 catalog
exemplified the Company’s expanded offerings. One of the best surviving
examples of pre-Depression S&H catalogs, the 1926–1927 edition directly marketed
to the burgeoning middle class, many able to purchase luxury goods for the
first time. Housewives could select from a variety of complete silverware sets,
ranging from colonial Puritan-inspired designs to deeply embellished bas-relief
collections. Camping equipment was available for days out with the family, as
well as waffle presses and electric heaters for leisurely Sunday brunches.
Clocks available for every room could be procured, along with dozens of towel,
sheet, and bedding types. For businessmen, long-standing pen manufacturer
Parker partnered with S&H to sell its famed fountain pens; Kodak and Amsco
negotiated similar arrangement for cameras. Belber provided leather travel
goods, professional briefcases, and umbrellas for both men and women. Children
flipped to the back of the catalog to view the latest Lionel and American Flyer
railroad sets, Erector kits, and Winslow ice skates.[90]

In late 1928 Fritz sold his shares in
the Studebaker Sales Company of Newark. The company had remained remarkably
stable, even if not as profitable as it had been in the early 1920s.[91]
But the automobile business no longer interested him. Fritz, as had been noted
at Yale two decades previously, was a natural problem-solver, eager for new
challenges. S&H would finally become that new adventure. Looking back at
the Great Depression, it was sadly ironic Fritz decided that 1929 was the year
to branch out into Wall Street. In March, the Bankers Bond and Mortgage
Company, on whose board Fritz served, bought and merged three smaller financial
firms and opened New York operations worth over $42 million (or $535 million in
2010 dollars) via a subsidiary, Manhattan Mortgage and Guaranty Company.[92]
Two weeks later, Fritz, Charles B. Coady, M. F. MacQuoid, Frederick F. Turrell,
and Harold M. Ward established Coady, Beinecke & Co., expanding on MacQuoid
and Coady’s existing firm.[93]
Portentously, the Wall Street Journal
announced the new partnership on April Fools’ Day. The new company immediately
reapplied for and obtained membership with the New York Stock Exchange and Curb
Market, and began trading operations. In October, the stock market crashed,
precipitating a global depression.

“Prosperity was at an end,” London
School of Economics professor Lionel Robbins recalled in 1935. The market
collapse dramatically halted the “roaring twenties” in America.[94]
The stock exchange disaster did not at first harm Fritz. William remembered
that his father continued managing Coady, Beinecke & Co., and the family
spent summer holidays in 1930 and 1931 in Westhampton, on Long Island.[95]
But Fritz and Carrie’s income gradually began to dry up. His Wall Street
brokerage desperately sought new clients, without much success. By February
1930 Fritz’s finances were pinched. In a letter to William’s school, the
Westminster School in Simsbury, Connecticut, he offered a $500 donation (or
$6,530 in 2010 dollars) to help defray the institution’s own financial
troubles. He nonetheless added that their request had arrived “during the stock
market debacle, and [for some period] I felt that I could not at that time do
anything concrete for the school.”[96]
He remained surprisingly patient, however, moving from one corporate problem to
another. Finding calm in poetry, a favorite pastime, he published an
exhortation entitled “A Call to Action” in the March 26, 1933, New York Times:

Our wilderness was conquered;
Our railroads pierced or scaled
the mountains because we believed in
the future, because we had abiding
faith in our own resourcefulness.
Let us again venture forth in search
of new conquests. Let us not rest
in seeming security. Let us not
measure each new venture in terms
of certain returns. Let us build our
highways for our sons and daughters.
Let us clean out the slums of
our crowded cities, and let us rear
these monuments with courage
with daring and let us be as brave
and venturesome as the pioneers;
but let us be the pioneers of better
civilization, a happier people and a
great and glorious democracy.[97]

Unfortunately the worst was yet to come. In early 1933
Studebaker returned to haunt him. While visiting the New Jersey beaches with
the Blakes, longtime family friends, Fritz was shocked to learn of Studebaker
chairman Albert R. Erskine’s suicide.[98]
The passing of a business leader who, in his son William’s words, had been “an
idol” to Fritz, may have been the final catalyst; he and Coady closed their
firm soon thereafter.[99]
Although S&H had been in better financial health than the now-defunct
Coady, Beinecke & Co., it too ceased making any profit and could not pay
dividends to its shareholders.[100]
Some of the family’s treasured assets, including the beloved family yacht, the Innisfree, were sold to pay outstanding
debts.

In order to remain solvent, the
Beinecke brothers decided to reform S&H’s complicated financial portfolio. On Edwin’s advice,
Fritz moved up to Boston, headquarters of a failing S&H subsidiary, a
department store named Houghton & Dutton. It had barely survived the turbulent years since 1929
and was uncompetitive against the likes of nearby Filene’s.[101]
The store shut its doors in late 1936, but not before Fritz spent two years
eking out whatever reforms and profits he could, thus bolstering (however
temporarily) S&H’s financial outlook until the worst of the financial
crisis had begun to pass.[102]
Although S&H was ultimately forced to sacrifice Houghton & Dutton,
Fritz’s efforts to bring in some revenue both rehabilitated his family’s income
and deepened his interest in the trading stamp business. The Beineckes returned
to Madison in 1936; two years later, he became first vice president of S&H,
commuting every day to corporate headquarters. Fritz had survived the Great
Depression, but he would never forget how easily the market could destroy his
life’s work.

Americans reacted in diverse and often
extreme ways to the Great Depression. A few, like Erskine, committed suicide.
They believed that all was lost, that the backbone of the American economy had
been permanently broken. Some others shifted into crime to survive. But many
other men and women simply renewed and reinvigorated their efforts to find work
and reestablish themselves. As he struggled to prolong Houghton & Dutton’s
existence, Fritz found solace in writing. His thoughts on economic reform,
entitled Liberty and Wealth, outlined
both his observations on the market paradigm that had led to the Great
Depression, as well as theoretical means of reforming capitalism: “So
complicated has become the machine of commerce that few will spend the effort
to study it, and few will have the patience to analyze it…To understand its
operations, we must learn something about society’s fundamentals,” including
education, entrepreneurship, and the workings of the free market.[103]
He submitted the manuscript for review to Lyne, Woodworth & Evarts,
Boston-based financial lawyers, in March 1935. While admitting the manuscript’s
clarity of economic fundamentals, they sharply criticized Fritz’s call for
centralized credit control in order to stabilize future price swings.[104]
In response to their critique, Fritz permanently shelved the manuscript. Subsequent
events proved Fritz’s approach correct, at least in part. Although the
government did not inherit control of all fiscal credit, the existing Federal
Reserve System was radically overhauled in the Banking Act of 1935. The Act
greatly expanded the role of the Board of Governors vis-à-vis regional Reserve
offices, and provided Washington increased control over market oversight. The
experimental Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, created in 1933, was
permanently established in 1935, a landmark Washington institution guaranteeing
depositors’ deposits if a bank should fail.[105]

The Beineckes had remained close to their
German relatives. In the 1900s and 1910s, Bernhard and Johanna repeatedly
returned to Germany to visit their Beinecke and Weigle family, friends, and
take comfort in childhood surroundings. After Bernhard’s death in 1932, his
sons continued the tradition. William recalled when Fritz, Carrie, and himself
visited Germany in 1937. The family sensed with some fear Hitler’s absolute
grip on German life, even if they, like so many others, remained unaware of the
world war that was about to begin.[106] At home, and with the worst of the
depression behind them, Fritz and Carrie began returning to New York City’s
social scene.[107] But
the outbreak of war in Europe swiftly put an end to their brief respite. S&H
remained surprisingly stable during the war years. Sales fell from roughly $3
million to $1 million per year from the onset of the Depression to its worst
point (or from $47.6 million to $15.9 million). Rationing and the industrial
shift from consumer to military production forced the company to downsize its
operations, but for those companies who still produced store goods, S&H
Green Stamps remained a useful marketing tool. By 1945, annual sales had
gradually recovered and escalated to $5.5 million (2010 est. $66.6 million).[108]

When the United States entered the war
on December 9, 1941, Edwin, Fritz, and Walter were too old to enter the
military. Fritz’s son William, however, had joined the navy via the V-7 “crash
course” officer-training program in 1940.[109]
He went on to serve in combat as an officer with USS Buck and, after it was sunk by a German U-Boat, USS Murray.[110]
Richard, too, soon joined the war, as a private (first class) in the Marine
Corps.[111] Back
at home, Fritz attacked labor leader John L. Lewis in the New York Times. The latter had successfully broken a “no-strike”
pledge previously agreed between the Roosevelt administration and various major
industries, bringing coal production to a halt.[112]
As he previously outlined in Liberty and
Wealth, Fritz believed that patriotism and economic strength were mutually
important, particularly in times of crisis.[113]
He returned to this theme in two articles apparently written for returning
businessmen. In “America Think! Your Future Lies Trembling in the Balance,” he
called for new endeavors to increase productivity, not loans.[114]
In “A General Staff—for Peace,” Fritz played the historian, describing “the
utter stupidity and ineptitude of this generation,” and demanded answers to why
so many had starved and died. Most tellingly he wrote, “This war has
demonstrated that our economy produces a great plenty of the necessaries of
life, and in addition can and does produce an enormous surplus which in peace
we do not know how to pass back to our people.”[115]
He would spend much of the next twenty-five years putting a solution to this
dilemma into practice: positioning S&H at the center of American postwar
consumption and donating vast funds to Western cultural and educational
institutions.

In a financially more secure position,
Fritz spent much of 1946 tracking down his German relatives via American Forces
Germany, sending them care packages, and providing European business contacts
wherever possible to aid the Beinecke and Weigle families’ survival.[116]
Fritz and his brothers were vehemently anti-Nazi and anti-Communist. In a 1947
pamphlet, entitled “Treachery Abroad,” he compared the rising Soviet threat to
the Third Reich’s horrors.[117]

Back in the United States, the return
of millions of servicemen and women catalyzed a tremendous economic boom.
“Levittowns” sprang up throughout the country to house a burgeoning middle-class
population. Skyrocketing demand, in turn, led to the revitalization of American
consumer production, expansion of department stores, and the first regional
malls.[118] This,
of course, boded extremely well for S&H fortunes. A 1947 editorial in The Detroit News recounted S&H’s
history and reminded readers of the bountiful array of products Green Stamp
collectors could obtain.[119]
“[I]n the 1950s the explosive demand for trading stamps,” economist Harold W.
Fox noted, “coincided with the rise of general-merchandise discount stores,”
spreading to other commercial sectors as demand rose. S&H research
estimates suggested that in 1959, of 51,217 households polled, seventy-six
percent liked Green Stamps.[120]
Richard D. Smith has estimated that by the 1960s nearly eighty percent of all
US households collected or had collected S&H Green Stamps for redemption.[121]
The supermarket proved to be S&H’s most lucrative postwar source.
Originally created in the 1940s, supermarkets multiplied and diversified across
the country in the postwar boom. Supermarkets and shopping centers very quickly
reached millions of suburban and rural Americans, opening vast new markets for
such enterprises as S&H and A&P. The press lauded the all-encompassing,
efficient, and copiously stocked stores, filled with domestic and imported
foods from nearly every part of the world. In a postwar, bipolar international
community, Americans became the first to receive the latest and most exciting
in foodstuffs.[122] George
Meredith, director of the Association of Retail Marketing Services in the
mid-1990s, recalled, “The supermarket gave the stamp business what the
department stores had given it originally, but with greater strength.” Since
families shopped almost daily for groceries, stamps booklets could be filled
more quickly, reaping greater profits for both supermarket firms and S&H.[123]
Under the Beineckes’ careful but energetic control, S&H maintained a
powerful grip on the trading stamp industry. S&H and A&P, one of the
United States’ largest supermarket chains, collaborated from the early 1950s
onward. A&P would provide one Green Stamp for every ten cents spent. In
return, S&H earned from A&P two-tenths of one cent per stamp. Their
collaboration proved eminently profitable, and consumers excitedly responded to
joint S&H/A&P promotions.[124]
The brothers, too, embraced the television craze; in 1959 for instance, Arlene
Francis, the nationally popular panelist of What’s
My Line and a former Miss Philadelphia winner, opened S&H’s new
Philadelphia redemption center.[125]
By the early 1960s, the Federal Trade Commission estimated S&H’s trading
stamp market share at a comfortable thirty-five to forty percent of the total
industry. A 1964 Fortune estimate
argued S&H’s hold on the trading stamp market was even greater; well over
half of the country collected and redeemed Green Stamps.[126]
Largely thanks to the Beineckes’ efforts to expand into supermarkets and
shopping malls, the number of trading stamps redeemed between 1950 and 1960
rose from 8.8 billion to 327 billion. Although this figure represented all
trading stamp companies, the sweeping growth provided S&H with very
positive profit margins.[127]
The Beineckes balanced S&H management with their other concerns: Edwin,
Fritz, and Walter shared management responsibilities at S&H; Edwin divided
his time between S&H and Fuller, while Walter also ran the John C. Paige
Insurance Company.

Forbes’
commentary revealed much about S&H’s operations in the post-war decades. The
brothers were family men, concerning themselves little with public attention or
social favor. At the end of 1963’s fiscal year, S&H held total assets of $256
million, of which $127 million was reserved in cash and securities (or, in 2010
dollars, approximately $1.82 billion total assets and $904 million in cash and
securities reserve). On the Fortune 500
List that year, only thirty corporations held more total cash and
securities. Stanley H. Brown, the report’s author, went so far as to suggest
that, even though S&H did not publish annual earnings, he estimated it to
be one of America’s largest privately owned companies.[128]
The Beinecke brothers had never forgotten the Depression; William recalled that
it had left “a deep scar” on Fritz, and their future business philosophy had
centered on cautious, constructive investment, with substantial savings.[129]

Success of S&H Green Stamps (and
their competitors) brought the renewed ire of some retailers and a number of
state governments. Merchants lobbying against S&H argued that Green Stamps
“represented below-cost pricing,” forcing non-participating companies to reduce
prices to the point where they, in turn, antagonized federal antitrust
officials watchful of unfair monopolization caused by excessive price
discounts. Safeway president Lingan Warren stormed into S&H headquarters
demanding an ultimatum with the Beineckes; he was firmly shown the door. Other
merchants turned to the courts to outlaw trading stamps on the grounds that
they excessively skewed the market system. By 1955, fifty bills had been
introduced at various civic levels in twenty-four states. Thanks in large
measure to popular public support for Green Stamps and their competitors,
however, only a few such levies and bans were passed.[130]
In July 1959, S&H won a landmark case concerning the financial status of
unredeemed stamps; in New Jersey v.
Sperry and Hutchinson Co. superior court judge Freund dismissed the state’s
case, arguing “(1) the stamps themselves must be presented for redemption
before any right to redemption exists,” and “(2) there was no proof as to any
individual holder’s having owned the prescribed minimum necessary to redeem.”[131]
Although other legal attempts were mounted against S&H, the New Jersey
ruling limited future efforts to inhibit S&H business.

In 1966, Fritz retired from S&H
(although he maintained his nominal director position until his death). The
company’s control passed to his son, William. Fritz left at perhaps S&H’s
peak. Demand remained strong, and S&H’s recent legal battles were safely
behind them. In 1966, it announced an initial public offering. Quoted in Time, William stated that its 1965–1966
income of $330 million ($2.22 billion in 2010 dollars) had been the company’s
highest ever. The Time reporter
nonetheless hinted at changes in consumer behavior that would hurt S&H’s
long-term future. With the market flooded with stamps and the introduction of
individual coupon programs, retailers large and small began crimping S&H’s
core markets.[132] Although
S&H remained nominally profitable, its market steadily shrunk. From 1973,
Bass Brothers Enterprises, a Fort Worth, Texas–based investment firm, began
aggressively buying up S&H stock. After Betsy Beinecke, William’s cousin,
sold her stake to Sid Bass in 1980, the Beineckes decided to sell the company,
eventually handing it over to Baldwin-United Corporation in 1981. In hindsight,
the Beineckes divested themselves of S&H at the right moment, before the
trading stamp industry collapsed in the late 1980s. William transferred much of
the income derived from the S&H sale into Antaeus Enterprises, a holding,
investment, and philanthropy firm, which continues successfully to this day.
William, nevertheless, was haunted by the sale and eventual closure of S&H,
a company that, at its height, constituted an important piece of American
consumer culture. “Often, in dreams,” he wrote, “I return to the board room of
the S&H building…[t]he camaraderie and team spirit of S&H was
impossible to duplicate.”[133]

In 1920, the famed sculptor Gutzon Borglum gave Fritz’s
brother Edwin a sculpture of wooing centaurs as a mark of his friendship with
the family. Borglum had become one of America’s most prominent sculptors. In
the vein of renowned artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Borglum had undertaken
numerous famed commissions, including a statue of Abraham Lincoln executed at
the request of Theodore Roosevelt and presented to Newark, New Jersey on May
30, 1911. In 1927 Borglum, a vocal supporter of the City Beautiful and urban
gentrification movements, would begin the monumental task of chiseling busts of
presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham
Lincoln at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota.[134]

The Beinecke brothers, members of New
York City’s German elite bourgeoisie, were widely respected both for their
adept business sense and lifelong intellectual investments. Edwin and Fritz
were two disciples of Yale English professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker, who
passionately promoted book collecting and preservation at Yale and mentored a
number of the twentieth century’s leading American collectors, including the
Beineckes, Frank Altschul, Wilmarth Lewis, Paul Mellon, and Herman Liebart.[135]
They became affectionately known as the “sons of Tink,” and formed the Yale
Library Associates in 1930.

The Yale experience engrained in the
Beinecke brothers a responsibility to give back to their community, to better
the nation’s knowledge and curiosity. Edwin, under Tinker’s mentorship, began
his personal library in the 1920s. Fritz started his book-collecting career
much later, after becoming deeply interested in the bizarre life of James
Wilkinson. Wilkinson, a former general in the American Revolution and, in 1804,
commander of the United States Army, allegedly conspired with Aaron Burr to
establish a new nation in the American Southwest. Their plan encompassed Mexico
and portions of the recently acquired Louisiana Purchase. But, as Gordon S.
Wood maintained, Wilkinson was an avaricious paid Spanish agent, who vacillated
between U.S. and Spanish interests and political and economic conditions
changed. Wilkinson soon turned against Burr, and reported the latter’s designs
to President Thomas Jefferson.[136]
Burr faced treason charges, but was ultimately acquitted.

Fritz’s fascination with Wilkinson’s
enigmatic past cultivated a much broader passion for the history of the Western
United States, an interest that also furthered his preoccupation with American
freedoms and the “pioneer spirit.”[137]
As a member of the Yale Library Associates, Fritz was intimately familiar with
the University’s existing Western Americana holdings; he handpicked much of his
personal collection with Yale’s repositories in mind.[138]
Like Edwin, he collected rare books not only for personal interest and
preservation, but also for their future access and usefulness to scholars. As
an incentive, he endowed an annual prize for the best doctoral dissertation in
Western American history.[139]
In the aftermath of 1956’s tumultuous events in North Africa and Eastern
Europe, he wrote in the Christian Science
Monitor that, the “fundamental principles” of the United States called the
nation,“ ‘With malice towards none and charity for all’… [to] bind the wounds
of this bleeding world” and point the way towards “the path of peace.”[140]
World affairs had spurred him to seek a better future, with a strong, educated
American public confident, but not adventurous on the world stage.[141]
In 1949, he and Carrie moved to Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Rather than
selling their beloved Madison home, they donated it to nearby Drew University.[142]
Once resettled, they underwrote local restoration efforts, usually with as
little publicity as possible.[143]
The Beinecke brothers had long sought as much anonymity in their philanthropic
efforts as possible, keeping their personal lives and financial affairs away
from prying eyes. Indeed, S&H remained at its lower Fifth Avenue
headquarters in Manhattan until 1964; even then, the move to a contemporary
building on Madison Avenue was explained away by S&H spokespeople as simply
a need for more space.[144]

This changed, however, in 1958,
although not without the brothers’ strident efforts to avoid the spotlight. The
brothers had long been active supporters of their alma mater’s libraries. Fritz
served as chairman of the Yale Library Associates and both funded and advised
on new acquisitions.[145]
In 1951, Edwin donated one of the world’s largest collections on famed author
Robert Louis Stevenson. Fritz followed suit with the donation of his extensive
Western Americana collection in 1956.[146]
The donation filled a prominent gap in Yale’s existing collections,
establishing or dramatically expanding Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, the
Spanish Southwest, and Mexican War collections. By 1960, the Beinecke Western
Americana collection contained over 2,000 rare artifacts; Fritz continued
adding to the collection and promoting its active use for the rest of his life.

By the late 1950s, Yale’s library
collections overwhelmed available space. In particular, its rare books and
manuscripts division had been flooded in the postwar decade with bequests,
grants, and donations from alumni seeking a permanent home for their personal
bibliographical collections. Yale and other major academic institutions had
become more favorable to obtaining rare books collections and assuming a
“distributed responsibility” to preserve and exhibit civilization’s important
documents. The shift towards rare book collecting, however, was gradual, and
Yale was financially unprepared to construct an entirely new library devoted
exclusively to rare and special collections. Offers to donate nonetheless
continued.[147] The
Beineckes, realizing their opportunity to establish a lasting center for the
advancement of learning, offered to assist with a two-million dollar gift, later
enlarged to over four million dollars (i.e., $28.5 million or $57 million in
2010 dollars). A 1958 letter from President A. Whitney Griswold indicated
Yale’s enormous gratitude:

Word has just come to me from the
Treasurer of the magnificent gift to the Beinecke Fund in the Yale Library; and
although I know you wish no publicity to be given to the gift and shall respect
this wish, I cannot resist writing each of you to tell you how deeply grateful
I am to you. You have all done so much for Yale that I doubt whether Yale can
ever thank you enough…[148]

Yale’s attempts to organize an important rare books
repository stretched back to 1924, when the Beineckes’ friend Tinker exhorted
the university to collect and protect the world’s unique texts. It was the leadership
of university librarian James T. Babb, known colloquially as “Yale’s collector
of collectors,” however, that renewed the impetus for the construction of a
rare books library. Babb and the Beineckes were old friends and fellow
book-collectors, and they met to discuss their vision for an avant-garde, free
standing special collections library that would draw some of the world’s finest
scholars.[149] The
Beineckes clearly envisioned an institution comparable to the world’s greatest
archives.[150]
Unfortunately, Walter died in September 1958, but his wife, Katie, would see
his shared dream of the library into fruition.[151]

The only area of significant (albeit
amiable) disagreement concerned the building’s location. President Griswold and
Babb wanted the library constructed as an extension to the existing Sterling
Memorial Library; the Beineckes sought a freestanding archive. As principal
backers and closely connected with the Fuller Construction Company (of which
Edwin had long served as chairman), Edwin and Fritz won out. As in earlier
donations, the brothers stressed their intention to minimize publicity.
Griswold and Babb, warming up to the idea of a freestanding building, excitedly
wrote to Fritz that they shared the Beineckes’ vision for “the largest
collection of rare research materials in one building in this country.”[152]
The prominent architect Gordon Bunshaft was selected to design the library.[153]
When completed in 1963, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library held
capacity for 820,000 items. Babb told the Yale
University News Bureau that the Beineckes had funded “the finest possible
building for the care and servicing of the world’s heritage.”[154]
Architecturally stunning, the Beinecke Library’s outer marble walls were
semi-translucent, permitting a degree of light to flow into a central,
multistory, glass-shielded chamber where visitors could look up at some of the
world’s greatest books. Any doubts about its location and design were swiftly
forgotten. Within three months, 551 researchers registered at the library, of
whom 140 had travelled from other universities to use Yale’s collections. In
comparison, the Yale staff proudly noted that a “similar leading American
library of similar character [The Huntington Library, Pasadena, California]
recorded about 800 [researchers] in the course
of a full year.”A further five
to eight thousand people had visited to view the rare text displays and the
library’s architecture.[155]
Within a year, the American Library Association awarded the Beinecke Library
its coveted First Honor Award.[156]

Today, Studebaker and the Red Hook
Light and Power Company are both long gone. The Beineckes sold The Plaza during
the Second World War. A Beinecke relative attempted to resurrect S&H Green
Stamps in the late 1990s, only to sell the venture soon thereafter.[157]
Yet the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library remains, still as
forward-looking as it was when designed a half-century ago. True to Edwin,
Fritz, and Walter’s vision, it is today undoubtedly regarded as one of the
world’s preeminent centers for scholarly research, a gift of knowledge where
many of history’s secrets await to be unlocked. Upon entering the Beinecke,
every visitor is welcomed with Fritz’s epitaph to civilization: “May this
library given to Yale University…stand as a symbol of loyalty and devotion of three
brothers and serve as a source of learning and as an inspiration to all who
enter.”

[33] Robert K.
Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain,
Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (New York: Ballantine
Books, 2004), 204, 288. The author wishes to thank Willow Dressel and Adriana
Popescu of the Friend Center Engineering Library, Princeton University for
their exhaustive efforts to locate a Beinecke patent.

[35] See Barbara W.
Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of
the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966).
For a brief synopsis of the United States’ growing economic prowess, see Paul
Kennedy, “The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy, 1865–1939,”
in Strategy and Diplomacy 1870–1945:
Eight Studies (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 17.

[83] “George B. Caldwell,
for the last eight years president of the Sperry & Hutchinson Company, and
William J. McKee, vice-president, will resign, effective January 1,” press
release, 1923, box 4, BFP.

[94] Lionel
Robbins, The Great Depression (London:
Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1935), 10–11. Also refer to David Cannadine’s
introduction to section II, in “Economy: The Growth and Fluctuations of the
Industrial Revolution,” in Making History
Now and Then: Discoveries, Controversies and Explorations (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 91.

[111] For further
information on William S. Beinecke’s wartime service, see “Midshipmen’s School
on the USS Prairie State and Service
Aboard the USS Buck, 1941–1943,” in
Beinecke, Through Mem’ry’s Haze, 161–184,
also 244, 247–249.

[131] “The State of
New Jersey, by Grover C. Richman, Jr., Attorney General of the State of New
Jersey, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. The Sperry & Hutchinson Company, A
Corporation of the State of New Jersey, Defendant-Respondent,” 1959, Box S3-B4
Reference-Sperry & Hutchinson Co. Legal, State of New Jersey v. S&H,
1959 opinion and decision (in favor of defendant, S&H), AE.

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